We fight this by having less partisanship and stronger free press.
Their direct incentives are getting sales (and now clicks), which doesn't appear to be highly correlated with accuracy. Additionally, my experience in college was that it wasn't the best and the brightest going into that field, though I deeply hope that it was a skewed sample, and believe that there are many deeply intelligent people working there.
However, I think it likely that many people are not drawn to the field for the pursuit of pure objective truth, but because they have a particular agenda and want to enlighten the world with it.
There is a quote about a logical fallacy that I can't quite remember, it goes along the lines of the following: You read an article about something with which you are deeply familiar. You laugh to yourself at the childish misconceptions of the journalist. You then turn the page to something you know little about, and assume that everything that is written is true. That doesn't make sense.
And I partially agree! But do not throw out the baby with the bathwater! I am a physicist myself and have seen how the Gell-Mann effect has become less problematic over time, especially in respected journals that want to be taken seriously by scientists: Just make a decisive effort to 1) go out of your bubble and 2) learn about logical fallacies.
Beyond that, I'm not sure stereotypes of any large group of human beings are worth addressing, other than to point them out for what they are.
Do these journalists work for large mainstream media corporations that are all owned by a shockingly small number of partisans, by any chance?
Do you have a complaint different from "It is not perfect so I do not believe in any of it"?
Sure, if you go back to the Watergate investigation.
Their track record in recent years is abysmal. They are basically the pseudo-official mouthpiece of the U.S. Democratic Party, and somewhere between the New York Times and the Huffington Post in terms of seriousness.
When facts aling with a policy idea this makes the policy good, not the facts wrong (and we should applaud both parties when they do it). I do not read every single article in WaPo but their front page and push notifications are most of the time fact based.
That party hated Bernie Sanders (who is plenty “liberal”[1]) nearly as much as it hated Trump, and both were covered very negatively by the Washington Post.
I don’t know why you assume I’m criticizing the Post from a right-wing perspective. Perhaps you are too steeped in the two-sided U.S. political culture, where disliking one party must mean liking the other?
By the way, reporting objectively correct facts does not make a publication unbiased or serious. Even if everything TMZ reports about celebrity relationships is true, do you consider them a serious news source? Deciding which facts to emphasize is just as important as telling the truth.
[1] To head off in advance any off-topic responses: this is true regardless of whether you mean “liberal” in the American or European sense.
- While I like Senator Sanders, reasonable people (I would like to believe I am one) can have stuff to dislike about his policies. This is how I view the non "alt right" complaints about him.
- Being more to the center than someone else, does not make you a mouthpiece for the centrist party.
Edit: I misread your comment again. I deleted an unrelated response.
Really wish we could find a solution that didn't involve trust... rather, cryptographic proof.
Then, when a questionable event happens, the video of all participants and anyone nearby can be replayed. Then, all videos of participants can be replayed to make sure they match up, and the video of the time leading up to the event could be scrutinized. Furthermore any one who visited that area in the recent past could be checked to make sure they didn't create some sort of hologram or something that the participants watched rather than the real thing.
Having cryptography without trust in some form of desire for teamwork in your fellow humans defeats the whole purpose of cryptography... But I admit this is more about my ideology and reasonable people can disagree about it.
Possibly could involve some kind of blockchain tech similar to https://proofofexistence.com. It doesn't solve all of the problems but at least we can begin establishing a record of source. The point is, something needs to be done to augment the trust we have in journalists because it's easy to trick or buy people out.
And as mentioned in the above comments, it does not help with analog loopholes and trust in the person being photographed.
> And as mentioned in the above comments, it does not help with analog loopholes and trust in the person being photographed.
Like I said in my above comment, it doesn't solve all of the problems but at least we can begin establishing a record of source.
I realize that people all the time try to say "Blockchain would be great for ____" so you're probably a little hypersensitive and I get that, but the suggestion of a blockchain was arbitrary and tangential to the real point of my post, so I don't really feel like getting into it right now.